Lévinas Emmanuel - A Propos, Levinas

The pre-text is made necessary in order to state what the text is not. It supplements the text by another text, which in augmenting the original, comes to replace it. These two statements make it necessary from the start to supply an abstract to the text. That abstract, drawn out from it, will form a separate text, different from the first two, to illuminate and impersonate both.

The deep interest of the present study lies with the image. Its power is to rent the field of meaning, leaving it other than thought. Language that serves the image through articulation is incapable of dealing with the remainder. Thus, image comes to haunt language, which is to say, dialectics, philosophy, and the contest for truth. The diabolic visitation of the guest that the house would have expelledderision, mockery, disrespect, and false pretensecan simulate truth. The study takes the premise that the incorporation of the image, through suppression, will remain the hidden source of trauma, a blow delivered to the production of meaning. Image announces its own coming in a shattering of form, at times simulating its own appearance. Although phenomenality is the stage, an a priori, quasi-transcendental backdrop is part of the play. The propos concern the fact that the image is not found in experience but escapes it. This exposes the power of the false whose simulations would suspend a truth that image represents, as conceived nearly three millennia ago.

The appropriation of the grammatical flaw produced by the imageits susceptibility to a traumatism that is an invention of the otherin Levinas's ethics must be challenged in light of the image and its operation. In trying to outflank such an inquiry by taking the imaginary out of play, he neutralizes the image's prerogative and consigns the performative event within the grammar of experience, the